That evening, the whole family comes to my sister’s hospital room, where she presides beautifully, wearing a lovely peach-colored nightgown I fetched for her from the gift shop, and her hair is clean and shining. She is even more radiant than ever, with her skin looking dewy and lit from within—and little Amelia—rosy little Amelia lies contented in her mother’s arms, pooching out her sweet pink little lips.
Joel, the delicious EMT, shows up at one point with a bouquet of flowers, and my whole family goes gaga over him. He explains that he hardly ever gets to deliver babies, and that he was, in fact, a mess when his own wife went into labor. And that makes everybody laugh, and my mother wants to invite him and his entire family over for dinner, except that my father quietly puts his hand on her arm before she can quite squeak out the invitation.
Brian, sitting by my sister’s side, is clearly smitten with the whole scene. I was a little worried that he was going to feel he’d been cut out of the deal somehow, but he doesn’t seem to mind in the least. Here he got a perfect baby girl without having to even endure one of my sister’s high-pitched screams, screams that will never, ever be mentioned by anyone, though they are going to live on in some pocket of my memory until the end of time.
“She looks like your brother,” says my mother to my father.
“Joe? I think you’re just saying that because he’s bald.”
“No. Look at the chin. It’s Joe’s chin.”
“But that’s just because he had his teeth knocked out playing street hockey. People with no teeth—like Amelia, for now—have those kinds of chins.”
To my surprise, my mother laughs. And my father tucks his head over her shoulder, and for a moment they’re both smiling down at the baby. It seems impossible to believe that this is a couple who communicates mainly through bickering. Maybe, it occurs to me, this is what marriage ultimately turns into: you have to tough it out through the bad times so that you can get to these pinnacle moments when life has just handed you a shiny star.
I’m not even surprised when Jeremy shows up, carrying balloons. Or when my parents greet him like the long-lost son they never had. Nor is it shocking that he and I leave the hospital together, going out for dinner, and that after that, we go to his mother’s house and sit on the screened porch where we spent thousands of hours doing homework and gossiping about other kids.
He’s grown up to be a good-natured, good-looking man who takes care of his mom, and I’m suddenly so sorry I broke his heart, except that I think that we all do need to have our hearts broken at some point, and so maybe I actually did him a good service. It’s something we need to know about ourselves, how that heart breaks and grows back.
My own heart, given away to Noah, now stirs somewhere deep down, stretches, yawns, looks at its watch and rolls over, tries to go back to sleep. But it has one eye open, I notice.
In no time, over a glass of wine, we’ve covered our college years and our employment decisions (his good, mine questionable). And then, because this is what you do under these circumstances, we rehash our own breakup, casting it in a new, more philosophical, forgiving light.
After he razzes me for falling for Brad Whitaker, I say to him, “Did you ever think that maybe you could have tried harder to fight for me? Like, you at least could have said you cared about me. Maybe asked me not to date him.”
“Um, I was not equipped at seventeen to have that kind of conversation,” he says.
“Yeah, well, you treated me like I was just one of your buddies and I honestly had no idea you cared one way or the other.”
He smiles and his eyes hold mine a lot longer than necessary. “Didn’t you, really?” he says. “Yeah, I know I wasn’t any Prince Charming, more’s the pity. But on the other hand, I’m the one who gets to sit here with you tonight, while he’s some loser out in the world not spending time with you. So maybe the good guy triumphs in the end, you know?”
He is gazing at me so directly that I have to look away.
Then he says, “I’ve, um, heard through the grapevine that you’ve had something of a rough go. We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to, but . . .”
“Oh,” I say. “Well. Yeah. Pretty much your average stood-up-at-the-altar situation. Not really ideal.”
“Well, that certainly sucks.” He looks at me like he wants to hear what happened, and not just so he can gloat a little bit over my poor judgment.
So I go through the story—the long version, including the two years Noah and I were together, the engagement excitement, and then him showing up late to the wedding and our horrible talk in the meadow, blah blah blah, and then I tell him about the honeymoon and the screaming monkeys, because by now it’s becoming The Story I Tell about My Marriage, and it always gets a laugh as well as a sympathetic clucking, depending on how I tell it.
With him, I confess the part I hadn’t told anyone but Natalie—how I dismantled my wedding dress—because he is the only person who would understand something that bizarre and find it funny. Sure enough, he laughs in all the right places—and he does this thing that I now remember he used to do as a kid: he sort of wrinkles his nose and closes his eyes before he laughs. It’s just a little quirk, but seeing him still do it makes my heart glad.
And then things shift slightly. Jeremy is looking at me without having to look away. He says that this is a momentous day, because not only have we been present at the miracle of birth, but he’s also gotten to hear about a jerk who is perhaps even worse than the jerk I ditched him for senior year.
When he comes over to the couch where I’m sitting and puts his hand idly on my arm, I slide over closer, and it turns out that, thank God, he’s learned something about kissing in the intervening years because I realize that I haven’t been kissed in quite a while, and I need it badly.
It’s still a slightly cautious kiss around the edges, of course, because it’s Jeremy—and also because I have hurt him before, and so maybe he’s wisely holding something back, but I throw myself into it, kissing him as passionately as I can, holding nothing back, just to show him how it can be done, and then—my God, in no time at all, we’re breathless and shocked at the heat we’ve generated.
He looks at me in surprise, and I see his Adam’s apple bob up and down. He smells like aftershave, and my mind briefly wobbles, goes to the backseats of cars in high school, to the hot breath of boys and their heavy aroma of sex—was it Old Spice? Something else?
“So, listen,” he says roughly. “Will you . . . I mean I know it’s weird, with my mother upstairs sleeping, but we used to be good at sneaking around, and—”
“Yes,” I say. “I will.”
He pulls away, wide-eyed. “Yeah? Really?” He blinks, and I think maybe he’ll lose his nerve. But then he says, “Okay then! Okay. Let’s do it!” And he takes me upstairs to his boyhood room, and I swear, it’s like time has stood still up there, with his single bed still in there and his old posters of Harry Potter.
“Dude, your room!” I say. “My God, everything’s still the same except the Star Wars sheets. How in the world have you not changed anything?”
He looks around like he’s seeing it all for the first time, too, and runs his fingers through his hair. “I’m hopeless, I know. I guess I was thinking I’d move out sometime, so why get new stuff?” He looks very concerned. “It is weird in here, isn’t it? The question is, is it too weird for you? Deal-breakingly weird? Are we going to have to go to Kmart before we can make anything happen between us, do you think?”
“No,” I say. “No! But seriously? Harry Potter?”
“Everybody knows that Harry Potter is cool, and besides”—he wraps his arms around me and puts his face up against mine, whispering—“full disclosure: the Star Wars sheets are in the wash. They’ll be back on the bed next time you’re here.”
I’m laughing as I wrap my arms around his neck. “Well, I can certainly see that you don’t bring a lot of women home.”
He gets all serious. “No. Well . . . I guess I don’t. My mom being here and all.” He starts planting little kisses all along my jawline, down to my neck. With his right hand he unbuttons my blouse. “And can you please . . . could we both stop laughing so we can have sex? Am I going to have to go get a paper bag for you to breathe into, because hysterical laughter really ruins a seduction scene.”
“Oh, brother. Is this a seduction scene?”
“Well, I’m trying,” he says, and he reaches around to unfasten my bra, and I attempt to be serious, which makes me start laughing all over again. “Could you?” he says. “Stop?”
He walks me, backward, over to his bed, and we fall down on the mattress, with him on top of me, and he says, “I can’t believe how long I’ve waited for this,” and I say, “Me, too,” as you do. It’s just the slightest bit awkward, but I’m wondering if life would have been altogether different if we had done this long, long ago—that day way back when he didn’t buy condoms. If I could go back in time, I’d insist we try another drugstore.